Posts Tagged ‘Appreciative Inquiry’

On June 5 I will give a keynote for the Forum Edu.Biznes in Warsaw. They asked me a few days ago to write down some text to present myself. I could have written down my resumé. I’ve chosen to write what I believe in.

My present is the past of my future.

This is one of my favorite sentences.

If I have to present me here I won’t talk too much about my past. Oh yes, I learnt a lot from what I did and I still do. I learnt a lot from my mistakes but I also know how I feel when I use my strengths. And I feel great.

Just have a dream. He is reachable if based on your strengths. Discover yourself. Project you. Appreciative Inquire what you did and still do.

When I discovered the Enterprise 2.0 concepts in a paper about Andrew McAfee, 7 years ago, everybody told me in my company it was not about people but about technologies and marketing. I was a manager in an HR company, then an HR consultant and I was told it was not the same area of work. Silos.

Then I started a yammer in my company with some colleagues. It worked. I used a lot social media tools to meet people and learn from them. I was amazed, and I still am, about the power of communities.

I started HRmeetup.org 2 years ago with some friends and twitter fellows. Next to my job. Working in the evening and some weekends. Today it is a community of more than 400 people meeting each month to talk about the future of HR. We learn from each others. We have fun. We have pragmatic dreams.

These activities allowed me to become a ‘conversation manager‘ for my company. Yes marketing met HR. HR met marketing. My boss knew how to use my strengths. I was engaged. I did what I love to do, what I think I am good at. I have learned by doing. I still do.

I’ve never stopped to talk, engage people about ‘the new world of work‘, about new leadership, from command and control to cultivate and coordinate, from top-down to bottom-up. About inclusive management and people engagement. About the granularity of motivation drivers.

Earlier this year I co-started a new project, called 99possums.com, to help organizations in facilitating participative workshops with an online narrative tool, making workshops more engaging and enjoyable.

Reverse HR.

I followed an innovation course at the University. I remember my boss didn’t understand why, as an HR consultant, I wanted to learn more about innovation. I just believe innovation is a people story. If HR wants to have some impact on business, innovation is certainly one of the domains they have to play a role in. But they often don’t. Innovation is not about collecting ideas. It is about making ideas real. And only people can.

I believe HR is too often stuck in old processes they continue to use, even if they know they get poor results, just because it is difficult to reinvent what we learnt at school. We have to “reverse HR”.

Think about that.

Culture. You cannot work on Culture. You have to connect individual shared values. These are what HR call ‘culture’.

Curiosity. Don’t ask people to share what they do with others before to enhance curiosity of all. Why should I share if I have no audience. Curiosity is a skill we killed in schools and we too often forget to develop back in companies.

Trust. If you want to work on trust in your company, deal first with individual fears.

Objectives. If you have an evaluation system based on goals to reach, think about the feeling each individual have when he reaches his goal. Think about who has to evaluate. Make it inclusive. A manager is there to make feedback happen, not to give points.

Recruitment. Don’t send job opportunities. Be attractive.

Coaching. Don’t hire a coach when everybody can be a mentor.

Communication. Don’t communicate, start conversations.

Learning. Start with understanding what is the difference between learning and development.

I’ve been always fascinated by learning. My mother was a teacher. I was not a good student. I often found my lessons boring and outdated.

I think schools have to stop just teaching ‘things’. Kids have to learn “how to’s”. To learn to learn.

Please teachers, learn kids ways of discovering knowledge and to share them. Learn them to help each other to understand and to learn. Ask kids what makes sense for them. Help them to build the content of their lessons. Send them all the content before school classes. Prefer long time for group work. The classroom should be the place you build projects from scratch based on what they learned by themselves. Focus on individuals and their strengths. If you want to learn geography for example, send to the kids before the classroom all contents on very different forms (books, videos, interviews, stories, …), let them learn the way they prefer and to give back what they learnt in the classroom based on their strengths. One can draw, one can speak, one can develop a concept, one can sell it, … Make each kid important for the group. Each has a talent.

It is not another story in companies.

Put people together. Value diversity. Help them to connect.

Enhance empathy. For their colleagues, for their customers, for themselves.

Do.

Stop trying to analyse best practices. Best practices only exist for the one who use it. Don’t copy it. Just be inspired and build your own.

Stop trying to analyse a problem. Starting a journey from a problem is not the way to go. Start your project from your dream and from what exists. Appreciate it. Enhance it. Be empathic, catch as much information as you can get. Then synthesize it. See things others don’t see. Draw what you see. Show it. Start a conversation from that. Build your dream. On an iterative way.

Yes, stop making long projects with unreadable gantcharts. When you finally will start your project the world has changed.

Do. Do it now. Try. Make mistakes and share what you learned with others.

Today’s organizations.

Leading organizations in our post-industrial era are made up of networked creative individuals engaging in spontaneous interactions. Their shared activities and intersubjectivity enable positive responses to challenges.

Today’s mechanistic organizations must evolve to adopt an organic enterprise architecture. This in turn can/will generate more commitment and agility. An organic enterprise is one where forms, methods and patterns are shaped as in living systems like cells or organisms up to populations, communities, and full ecosystems.

An organic organization develops purposeful, emergent, user-centric and collaborative methods that continuously enhance learning, curiosity, creativity and efficiency. This provides them with unique advantages to adapt to the needs of all stakeholders in the customer value stream.

From silos to porous membranes, from owning to sharing, from control to trust, from linear processes to social technologies, a new kind of leadership has to emerge.

I believe.

When we developed our manifesto with all the HRmeetup attendees one year ago, I never thought I would be so happy to see the result and to share the same point of view. But I can reproduce the same words:

I believe in the inner power of people, in their talents, in their potential, in their incredible ability to do more, better, and greater.

I believe in a culture of feedback, transparency, authenticity, connectivity, and collaboration, key elements to employee engagement and performance. A culture that makes sense and gives purpose to organizational action.

Listen to personal values. Evolutive, internalized, integrated, they are people’s drivers. Offer the right tools and environment, and let them reveal their latent ambitions.

Make both mission statements work together in harmony.Facilitate their integration by acting as leadership developers, culture facilitators, business interactions architects, guardians of fairness, recognition, and effective conversations.Think forward. Dare to be different. Make it playful.